Philip Roth continues his recent practice of delivering a new short novel every year. The tone of these works has been dark and foreboding, and they seem to be getting more so with each book. Roth, the great explorer of taboo subjects in his early career, now fixates on illness, decline and death — forcing us to ask whether this is a new phase for the author, or just his bold assault on the ultimate (in more ways than one) taboo.
Instead of Goodbye, Columbus or Portnoy’s Complaint we now get the portrait of the artist as an old has-been. We still have the familiar Roth obsession with sex, but his characters in The Humbling fantasize even more about killing themselves. At one point Roth places his hero amidst of the patients of a psychiatric hospital where the most popular subject of conversation is suicide, which is addressed in both practical and theoretical terms. Welcome to the late Roth, where hanky-panky is less exciting than hara-kiri.
You might think that it would be hard to get more dispiriting than Roth’s Everyman (2006), which opens with its hero already in a coffin, or Indignation (2008) which starts out with its protagonist having suffered a fatal combat wound in Korea. But you would be wrong. At least these characters had some animating spirit before the Grim Reaper intervened, unlike Simon Axler, the aging actor at the center of Roth’s latest fiction The Humbling.
Axler has lost his talent…and his will to live. He was once a nonpareil actor, but his skills have apparently disappeared. The novel opens shortly after Axler’s disastrous appearance as Macbeth at the Kennedy Center. His agent implores him to return to the stage, but Axler feels that his case his hopeless. “Something fundamental has vanished,” he confesses,. “Maybe it had to. Things go.”
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